Journeymen (Germany)

In the mid-19th century journeyman embraced a heterogenous category: some were in very reduced
circumstances on the fringe of industries or in threatened professions like weaver, trimmer, glove
maker, wig maker, etc. Wages for the few who found work fell close to subsistence. Low wages
predominated among tailors, cobblers, joiners and other occupations whose numbers remained
significant. Their situation contrasted to the comparatively better paid mason, carpenter, baker,
butcher, but also the printer, type setter and furrier, whose income was often several times that of
journeymen on the low side of earnings hierarchy. Although certain groups still lived and were
boarded in the masters' household, while a growing number were paid in cash, it is impossible to
appraise wage differences accurately. Matrimony was a further line of differentiation: as the
promotion to master of a growing number of journeymen could no longer be taken for granted, the
total of those married increased proportionately. For example, in 1849 in Leipzig the portion of
married journeymen among lock smiths was 23%, among masons 74%. The situation of
journeymen varied according to several additional factors: legal relationships in domicile; guild
regulations; and greatly differing sizes of branches of the trade and factory classifications in
particular states and regions. For example in Berlin in 1848 printers, masons and carpenters had
ten journeymen or apprentices for every master, whereas among cobblers the proportion was 1:1.
Strong differentiations existed also in sizes of factories and the type of wages among rural and
urban journeyman. In large cities a significant proportion of industrial employees had to alter their
profession from workshop to factory. Above all in the centers of early industrialization the status of
numerous journeymen closely resembled modern wage labor; many of them were incorporated in
industrial concerns with more impersonal relationships of dependency than in artisanal
establishments. After the early 1840s social differences in mentality increased between journeymen
and skilled workers.

The development benefited numerous worker and journeymen's improvement associations, likewise
founded in the early 1840s, some with several thousand members. It is hardly possible to
exaggerated their influence on changes in mentality, since they often allowed the journeymen to
assimilate modern, bourgeois-rational theories and sometimes socialist ideas, in spite of the strong
system of repression during the pre-March era prevailing in states like Prussia and Austria. The
continuing importance of the itinerant tradition in many groups of journeymen to a certain extent
allowed the spread of pre-Marxist early socialism. Above all, tailors, cobblers and cabinet makers
learned "on the road" that led to Paris where they absorbed the prevailing early socialist theories
which they in turn spread in the homeland. The prohibition on combinations and the strong police
surveillance of journeymen's fraternities in most states likewise often contributed to a rejection of
the pre-March system.

Under these circumstances it not surprising that the journeymen were a important social stratum
transmitting the revolutionary movement of 1848. Among the Berlin barricade fighters, journeymen
were over half of close to nine hundred arrested and casualties of the military. They included a
disproportionately large number of tailors, cobblers, and cabinetmakers, the pasrticularly radical
journeymen's groups of the pre-March. Viennese revolutionaries in late October 1848 comprised a
similarly important number of journeymen among the wounded and those with known professions.
At least in large cities like Cologne, Vienna or Berlin, the journeymen and workers provided the
social basis for the largest radical democratic associations.

Parallel to the general political engagement, the journeymen formulated numerous petitions in the
first phase of the revolution to the German and Prussian national assemblies, the Austrian
Reichstag, the ministries, the responsible magistrates and their employer, giving expression to their
social and economic demands. In addition to the usual summons for an increase in wage and
shortening of hours of work, these petitions included many unprogressive, anti-modern requests
like the termination or limitation in the use of machinery, ending women's labor, and prohibition of
freedom of trade; the formulations clearly reflected a failure to escape from the traditional artisanal
pattern of thought among a large proportion of journeymen. The traditional prejudices of many
journeymen in 1848 was indicated by their leadership in brawls hostile to Jews at the beginning of
the revolutionary year. On the other hand many of the journeymen's petitions included modern
socialist or social state demands like the founding of a ministry of labor, adult education, health
insurance, and national workshops on the Parisian model. When masters failed to respond to
journeymen's demands, the conflict escalated relatively quickly into an open labor struggle. Most of
the successful strikes followed the traditional pattern; a few like the Berlin printers took on a
modern form of the conflict over wages, including inter-regional coordination, solidarity between
trades, and public agitation. The beginnings of the labor movement, in particular the Berlin central
workers' committee in early April and the worker fraternization at the end of August 1848
integrated the most important and largest journeymen and workers' groups and redirected their
social-political wishes and initiatives. The unprogressive demands largely disappeared; social
concerns were no longer raised separately by individual journeymen's groups, rather bundled
together to a consistent catalog of complaints by the central committee or the worker fraternization,
which would have led to a modern social state, if they had been implemented. In general the early
workers' movement was transmitted and imprinted far less by the workers in a narrow sense than
by the journeymen. However, although the democratic journeymen sympathetic to the working
movement were in the majority in large cities, conservative tendencies continued among certain
occupational groups, above all in nutritional trades like bakers and butchers.